UA grad students robbed at gunpoint in University Village parking lot

Friday

Oct 18, 2013 at 12:01 AM

It’s common for college students to come and go at all hours of the night. That’s why University of Alabama graduate students Li Yang and Molei Wu didn’t think anything was unusual when a young man waved and approached them in the parking lot of University Village early Monday morning.“I thought he was a neighbor,” Yang said. “But then he walked up, held a gun out and told me to give him my purse.”

By Stephanie TaylorStaff Writer | The Tuscaloosa News

It’s common for college students to come and go at all hours of the night.That’s why University of Alabama graduate students Li Yang and Molei Wu didn’t think anything was unusual when a young man waved and approached them in the parking lot of University Village early Monday morning.“I thought he was a neighbor,” Yang said. “But then he walked up, held a gun out and told me to give him my purse.”Yang handed over her bag while Wu gave another man his backpack. The bags contained their apartment keys and car keys, wallets, iPhones, cash, bank cards, identification, text books, a history paper and a flash drive containing schoolwork.Yang and Wu, both 24, had studied late into the night at a campus library and returned to their apartment a short time after midnight Monday.The complex off 10th Avenue is staffed with security guards, monitored by cameras and restricted by a gate with keypad access. It’s surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire, but police later discovered a hole in the fence that the young men likely used to enter and later flee the area, Wu said. Police found his backpack on the property and returned it.Officers have few clues in the case, said Tuscaloosa Police spokesman Sgt. Brent Blankley.“We are working the case and urge anybody who knows about it to call CrimeStoppers,” he said.Four suspects were involved in the incident, Yang said.Yang said that the young man who threatened her with a gun appeared to be 15 or 16. The other suspects seemed older, she said.“He wasn’t nervous, which makes me think he’s done this before,” she said. “We want people to know that this happened in case they do the same thing again.”Yang, who is studying journalism, and Wu, a mechanical engineering student, said that they have never heard of problems at the apartment complex before.